Press freedom is generally respected in the United Kingdom, but CPJ was alarmed by a legal case in which Interbrew, a Belgium-based brewing group, and the British Financial Services Authority (FSA), a banking and investment watchdog agency, demanded that several U.K. media outlets turn over documents that had been leaked to them. The case threatened…
New York, March 3, 2003—A bomb destroyed the vehicle of Nino Pavic, an influential independent newspaper publisher, on the morning of Saturday, March 1, in Croatia’s capital, Zagreb. According to local and international press reports, the 50-year-old publisher and his family were sleeping in their home in the affluent suburb of Tuskanac when a bomb…
New York, March 3, 2003—A bomb destroyed the vehicle of Nino Pavic, an influential independent newspaper publisher, on the morning of Saturday, March 1, in Croatia’s capital, Zagreb. According to local and international press reports, the 50-year-old publisher and his family were sleeping in their home in the affluent suburb of Tuskanac when a bomb…
The exhilarating prospect of broad press freedoms that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago has faded dramatically in much of the post-communist world. A considerable decline in press freedom conditions in Russia during the last year, along with the stranglehold authoritarian leaders have imposed on media in Central Asia, the Caucasus,…
The shaky coalition of reformist parties elected in 2000 after the death of the nationalist President Franjo Tudjman pressed ahead with political and economic reforms in 2001 and pushed to join the European Union. As a result, press freedom conditions in Croatia continued to improve. The government and the Parliament made some tentative efforts to…
New York, March 19, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is very concerned about two recent crippling libel judgments against the satirical weekly Feral Tribune. The judgments were issued in two separate libel suits filed by Marica Mestrovic, the daughter of a famous Croatian sculptor, and Zeljko Olujic, an attorney and former ally of the…
HORACIO VERBITSKY is one of Argentina’s leading investigative journalists, and a columnist and press freedom activist. He has built his distinguished career by fearlessly exposing government corruption and battling restrictive press laws. A working journalist since 1960, Verbitsky’s relentless pursuit of a story has earned him his nickname el perro, or the dog. In January 1991, Verbitsky…
POLITICAL REFORMS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH, along with the advent of democratic governments in Croatia and Serbia, brightened the security prospects for journalists in Central Europe and the Balkans. In contrast, Russian’s new government imposed press restrictions, and authoritarian regimes entrenched themselves in other countries of the former Soviet Union, particularly in Central Asia, further threatening…
FOLLOWING THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT FRANJO TUDJMAN in December 1999, the advent of a reformist government brought a better year for the Croatian press. An opposition alliance defeated the late president’s nationalist HDZ party in January 2-3 parliamentary elections and in two rounds of presidential voting over the next five weeks. During the parliamentary election…
By Chrystyna Lapychak Wars in Yugoslavia and Chechnya dominated regional and international headlines in 1999. The conflicts raised the journalists’ death toll in the region and prompted crackdowns, as governments blocked access to war zones and engaged in propaganda campaigns.